Exclusive Interview with Jason Duke of Pzyche: Part 1

Welcome back to the Lunch with Becky interview series, an exclusive online opportunity to get to know your iGaming industry peers and their respective lines of business. In this edition I had the pleasure of dining with Jason Duke, founder of Pzyche, also known for his tenure with Party Gaming, a passion for search engine algorithms and ease of speaking in front of crowds at conferences. Throughout our time together, we discussed Duke’s background in the iGaming and search engine world, the general philosophy behind Pzyche, what Pzyche delivers clients and how they go about doing it.

Duke launched Pzyche in mid 2010 and nostalgically refers to his creation as “The holy trinity of Online Marketing – Acquisition, Conversion and Retention”. To deliver on this bold statement, Pzyche aims to provide their client’s visitors with an amazing experience that is personal as opposed to simply treating visitors “as best as possible”. We all know that conversions are essential for operator and affiliate success. To get conversions, you need the right traffic that is interested in what you are offering- this is exactly what Pzyche believes they are equipped to deliver.

Part 1. Interview with Pzyche founder Jason Duke: Getting to know Duke and Pzyche

RL: What is your background in the gaming industry?

JD: I became involved in online gaming around the turn of the century. I was initially a good old-fashioned affiliate who happened to have a pretty good understanding of search and the search engines. The 2 seemed to go hand in hand. You ranked and you earned, and boy did you earn back then. It was the glory days of Poker, and although I miss them, I think they might be coming back. Gaming wasn’t the core of my business though; it was, in reality, a side-line to the financial services part of the business where I operated quite heavily in the UK space.

But my personal passion was in the geeky pursuit of search engine algorithms and the more I worked in that area the more I got involved with gaming. It was hard to not be part of the industry pre UIGEA and I ended up with a large commitment in a bingo business back in the early to mid naughties. We didn’t do too bad either, holding the top spots for phrases like bingo, online bingo etc in Google. I also had a few corporate gaming clients in the other verticals.

A few years ago I took a phone call from a guy that would ultimately become my boss. That guy was Sabin Brooks, now a Vice President at Harrahs Interactive Entertainment, but then the Group Global Director of Marketing at Party Gaming. I remember meeting up with him, Rupam Deb and what seemed like half the marketing team at a hotel in Victoria. They, led by Sabin, convinced me to join the team at Party heading up some online marketing departments. I am quite proud of the work I did there, building an amazing team from scratch, taking PartyPoker to number 1 rankings around the globe for phrases such as poker, online poker and others, whereas previously the site didn’t rank anywhere in the top 1,000 for literally anything apart from it’s brand. I had some great times at Party and miss many of the people and challenges but after those heady heights I needed a new challenge and Pzyche® was to be it…

RL: What is the main concept for Pzyche and how did you come up with it?

JD: I saw what I thought was a big issue in running web businesses. We treat every visitor to our sites as one huge homogenised group. We treat every visitor the same, delivering the same staid experience to everyone, despite every visitor being an individual.

Some great companies do A/B or even multivariate testing to improve the experience for their visitors, but treating all your visitors the same, treating them “as best as possible” is the same as treating all your visitors “least terribly”. I didn’t think that was right and deep down knew there had to be a better way.

I wanted to shake things up; I wanted everyone to get an amazing experience that was personal to them. Surely if we understood someone as the individual they are, not some random IP address, we can deliver greater value to them, as well as extract greater value from them. It was with this aim that Pzyche was born and fast forward a year or 2 and here we are. Our 1st vertical is the one we know and love, gaming, for a number of reasons. For all the talk of gaming being a cutting edge industry (which it is) there are some areas we are way behind lots of other industries.

Conversions are dire in our business and historically that’s been countered by simply pumping more and more time, energy, resource and cash into acquisition of traffic. Acquiring traffic is essential but making sure you acquire the RIGHT traffic is key and ensuring you treat the visitor that you’ve just paid cash, sweat or a combination of both, to get to your site and treating them as a king or a queen has to be the way forward.

Why pay Regal rates for your traffic if you don’t do everything you can to get Royal Returns.

Giving everyone the ability to identify the right traffic, having the ability to treat these people as the kings and queens they are and retaining them as customers is what Pzyche does. It’s the holy trinity of Online Marketing – Acquisition, Conversion and Retention.

Exclusive Interview with Jason Duke of Pzyche: Part 2

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